The Mob Lawyer: Life Support for Crime

In the past few years, virtually all the leaders of the old Mafia families have been imprisoned or indicted, and police are now targeting the new organized-crime groups that run the U.S.'s cocaine traffic. The nation's mobsters and drug racketeers never needed good lawyers more than they do today. To law-enforcement officials, some of those lawyers are as suspect as the mobsters. Last week a staff study for the President's Commission on Organized Crime charged that a small group of "renegade attorneys" helps supply the "life-support system of organized crime."

The lawyers have made themselves "integral parts" of today's complex criminal...